To permalink or not to

[soulvagabond]

Have a blog which ranks quite well in g**gle.
Sometimes it resides on page one, the rest of the time on page 2.
At the moment it uses the wp default linking structure like site.com/?cat=16 etc...
I'm thinking of activating the seo friendly permalink structure, but not sure, if there's any benefits in doing so, or on the contrary, it might loose the current rankings.
Any ideas?

 

[nickycakes]

maybe you should have googled for the answer first:

SEOTips: Permalinking vs. Not Permalinking

 

[kblessinggr]

I've found that friendly urls tend to rank better as the urls are more descriptive, but in general it just looks better in a google listing than yadayada.com/index.php?id=something&somethingelse=yadayada , compared to yadayada.com/how-to-make-money/

Which do you think is more likely to be clicked on if going just by the url shown under the data google delivers?

 

[soulvagabond]

Yeah, the best answer around! Exactly what I needed.
How do I close this shit?

maybe you should have googled for the answer first:

SEOTips: Permalinking vs. Not Permalinking

 

[kblessinggr]

Yeah, the best answer around! Exactly what I needed.
How do I close this shit?

in firefox, right click the tab then close that way. You may get one alert but least that would be the only one.

 

[LotsOfZeros]

that never gets old

 

[JoshTodd]

In all seriousness though, the friendly permalinks are much better. All you have to do is check one box in the WP Admin panel and you are good to go, and don't forget to rebuild your XML Sitemap if you have one. It's especially good if you are using your blog for some type of a niche site, so that Google can index all the different keywords that are in your permalinks, instead of just your main domain.